A big, red bow that sat on her head topped off the 13-year-old’s stylish outfit: red tights and suspenders, a black skirt, black-and-white shirt and black shoes.

And in a Winnebago County courtroom on Nov. 4, I watched K. (not her real name) walk from the witness stand and get down on the floor to show Judge Gary Pumilia a push-up-type exercise.

She was testifying at the murder trial of her mother’s live-in boyfriend, Duran Johnson, accused of beating her 3-year-old sister, Kaitlyn Head, to death 2½ years earlier. She’d been asked by the prosecution to demonstrate the “stretch it out” punishment that Johnson and her mother, Melanie Grant, made her, Kaitlyn, and another sister — then 4 — do, often for hours on end.

Their arms couldn’t be bent. Their butts couldn’t be in the air. They couldn’t put their knees on the floor. They had phone books tied with winter scarves attached to their backs. If they didn’t do the exercise right, they’d be hit with a belt.

It all happened in their apartment home in the 600 block of 11th Street in Rockford, a place that prosecutors called a “house of horrors.”

In Winnebago County, there are, on average, 11 cases of child abuse reported each day. In four of those cases, evidence is found to support the claim, according to data from the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. Winnebago County’s abuse and neglect rate is more than double the state average.

Lori Thompson, a pediatric nurse practitioner at the Medical Evaluation Response Initiative Team at the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Rockford, told me Tuesday that the Kaitlyn Head case is an “extreme example” of the type of abuse cases that MERIT handles in its 15-county area. “But every day is a house of horrors for an abused child who walks on pins and needles, and no matter what the abuse, it’s horrible.”

On some mornings, things were good in the white-sided house on a main Rockford thoroughfare where K. and her family lived. K.’s mother would send her off to fourth grade at Maude Johnson Elementary School and “she would give me a kiss,” K. said. “We’d tell that we love each other, and she’d tell me ‘come straight home.’ ”

Sometimes, though, her younger sisters would be “on punishment” when K. left for school. If K. was “on punishment,” when she got home from school, she’d read for 30 minutes and from 4 p.m. until she went to bed at 8 p.m., she would have to “stretch it out.” She did so in the living room, in the bedroom that her mother shared with Johnson, in the kitchen or in her sisters’ bedroom.

Page 2 of 3 - One time, K. was put on punishment because she showed favoritism when she and Kaitlyn were sitting on the couch “under a book” and their 4-year-old sister wasn’t included.

While being punished, the girls got half-cooked Ramen noodles to eat and half a Dixie cup of water while their mom and Johnson ate onion burgers. “It smelled good,” K. said.

And at the direction of her mom and Johnson, K. scraped the bottom of Kaitlyn’s feet with a bristled brush as part of her sister’s punishment. “She would cry,” K. said. She said her youngest sister “was on punishment mostly all the time because she had a bladder problem and peed herself in bed.” If K. didn’t do what she was told, she said, “I’d get a whoopin’.”

K. said Kaitlyn’s ears were black and her sister had a black eye the day K. and her mom came home from the store when Kaitlyn was left with Johnson.

And on that day or the next when Kaitlyn lay dead on a bed in their home, K. said, “my mom asked me if I could hear her heartbeat.” She couldn’t. Her mom asked her to listen again. K. told her she heard it, “because I did not want to make her feel bad.”

Half of Kaitlyn’s body was covered in bruises and abrasions when she died. Kaitlyn’s sisters now live with family in Chicago. Johnson was found guilty of first-degree murder and faces a minimum of 60 years and up to 100 years in prison. Grant was sentenced to 22 years.

“These are the cases we know about,” Thompson of MERIT told me.

Thompson performs physical exams of children suspected of having been physically or sexually abused or neglected. She added that “it’s not often that there is just one victim in the family.”

Thompson is imploring all of us, including those who are mandated by law to report abuse, to “step up.” Such reporters include teachers, doctors, police, counselors and clergy.

“If you have a suspicion, report,” she said. “You don’t have to figure out who did what, when or where. ... Make the phone call, even if you are not sure. Let the investigators figure it out.”

And when kids “finally do tell something,” she said, “listen. They will tell you when they feel safe. And they will tell in bits and pieces.”